Sony's PlayStation 3 pricing strategy has caused the company to lose around $3bn (£1.5bn/€1.9bn) over the past two fiscal years. But the electronics giant's still willing to give the console away - provided you buy a Bravia telly.
The firm’s 2008 annual report shows that Sony lost $2.1bn in fiscal year (FY) 2007 - the 12 …

I'm seriously considering buying a second PS3

As a household we are almost completing the move to a Windows Home Server containing all of our digital media..Although we have an Xbox 360 (Elite) I prefer the PS3 front end (with one exception) for interfacing with the WHS.

For us, the PS3 is an ideal choice as a front end to WHS and as a BluRay player.

they already did this last xmas

re: It's not fair

"It's such a good console why doesn't anybody want to buy one?"

Are you getting your consoles confused? In Europe, despite launching 18 months later than the xbotch360, it's already ovetaken in in total sales. So if nobody is buying the PS3, then the 360 userbase must be going backwards... (perhaps once people have had it go wrong more than three times, they throw the crap in the bin and buy a proper console).

Better Than Wii

I think its has always been known that sony sell the PS3 at a loss, because its using High Tech chips that cost 100's of millions to R&D. Where as the Wii's Dev team just buggerd off to PC World's Bargin Bin!

The Wii is like a Buzz Lightyear it looks modern but really its just a LED light and a few springs.

@ Mark

Mark you're so wrong, Sony are EVIL and must die!!1! It's Microsoft who should always win, I learned COMPUTING using Win98 and solitaire and got used to them and being used to something can sort of feel like love and I don't want things to change, EVER!!1!! Because I don't want to learn to love something else!!!1!

They all suck

@ A Baird

Sorry to disagree with you - but I was a lifelong PC Gamer - and now I'm a PS3 convert. It just works - bung in a game and it plays. No choosing graphics settings to get the best out of my system, no faffing about with updates. No issue with getting the latest drivers. I imagine the same is true for Xbox (no fanboiz here).

And then I use mine as a networked media player. And of course, a Bluray player. And if I felt like it, I could install linux on it. Yes you can do all that with a PC, but frankly I just can't be arsed.

And all with GTA IV for about £300. Compared with the cost of a PC, I think that's a pretty good deal.

@A Baird

PS3 is the closest you will get to PC gaming. It's got the HDD as standard, it's got installs to speed up gamplay, it integrates custom content (UT3...).

I know plenty of people that are ditching PC gaming in favor of consoles, and in particular, the PS3, as it's got plenty of upsides, with few of the downsides. No need to mess with drivers, stick the game in and play, no 30 minute installs (maybe 5min partial installs), you have the benefits of being able to use keyboards and mice for FPS, you can use mods and custom content.

PC gaming is dying, piracy is too rampant, Crysis are focuing on consoles now, and their future projects are dumping PC's for good due mainly to piracy, and the fact consoles are more mainstream.

@A Baird

You forgot to mention taking more time and money to set up, more patching, having to download more drivers just to play the latest games, spending hours diagnosing game crashes just because your system has one different chip to somebody elses and various other things.

Even if YOU have never had problems, I was a PC gamer for years, played Quake, Quake2, Counter-Strike all in clans as well as going to LAN parties every couple of months. Every single game that comes out comes with a decent percentage of people who cannot play it due to problems.

Sorry, but PC gaming is a pain in the arse, whether the end result is worth it or not.

There was a time when I too would have defended it with my life and I recall saying pretty much the same things as in your post. Those times have passed though and I no longer have the patience to have to bugger about with things to make them work......unless somebody is paying me to of course :)

@A Baird

Only way you'll get a PC that runs games "better" than a PS3 or 360 is if you spend a grand and a half on it. And then you'd still have to wait half an hour to install the game, pray your joystick works correctly and suits to the task, figure out 46 keys to activate everything, configure all the options to suit your setup, only to then go online and the guy your playing against has a faster PC and kicks your behind.

I've a iMac, Sony Laptop, Wii, 360 and 2 DS in the house, only game I ever play on the PC is Football Manager and thats purely as its portable.

No contest.

PS3 better gadget (and you pay for it). 360 better GAMES console. You know.. actual games.. that you can play.. something most PS3 owners seem to fail to discuss, maybe they don't have any good games??

@ A Baird PC or Console?

Not to jump on the band wagon, but honestly, how much would it cost to get a PC able to play a triple A title.

Fortunately with the new range of graphics cards out now , the cost of that component alone (that will play almost all AAA games at 1280x1024 plus with anti aliasing x4 and Anisotropic Filtering x8 etc on [layman's terms:makes it prettier!]) will probably cost less than £120.

Factor in about £300-£400 for the rest and you are there.

But as some others point out, by the time you have installed and run a PC version, the console player is already past the first level!

OTOH, good luck on the console printing your CV!

However, all consoles allow browsing the "interweb" these days. Heh and did you know that the BBC iPlayer supports the Wii? Not bad to match up to the all singing and dancing PC (but no wii mote :( )

Actually, sticking on the gaming front, and the PS3 we have a recent AAA title called Metal Gear Sold 4: Guns of the Patriots. This series is the reason I bought a Playstation, and also a Playstation 2 (although the DVD player really sold it to my wife!). So at some point, I will make the HD leap and get a PS3 (with it's Bluray to get the wife round!)

And Grand Theft Auto 4: was released on both Xbox 360 and PS3 recently.

Where the PC wins out over both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 is the online gaming. MMOs (World of Warcraft, Mass Effect, Everquest1/2, Age of Conan, Spore) are a reserve of the PC. Heck even the FPS does due to 8 aside limits on the consoles.... (64 a side in Joint Operations on the PC and typically 32 players per side for most FPS games). Note though that online matching on the Xbox 360 is unparalleled. But all the XBox 360 players I know mute the incessant "gay/faggot" abuse that is so prevalent in XBox adolescent land.

We have yet to see Sony's offering that is Home. But it looks damn good!

The parting shot to that, I leave to the PC, which has plenty of "free" third party matching online software from Gamespy to All Seeing Eye and XFire.

I droped my PC off at work

I spent £650 last march upgrading my PC so it would run Supreme commander, I played lots of other games on it until I bought my PS3.

Then I found that I didn't have to upgrade my video card every 6 months (£200+ down the drain) I didn't have to spend £300 on a new windows licence every few years (cant play DX10 on win xp).

The final boot for PC gaming was when I bought Forged Alliance pack for Supreme commander, and found that even though I had 4Gb ram, 3 SATA2 disks in a RAID 5 config and a £200 video card (when I bought it 1950XTX) I still had to run it at mid settings and accept the stutter while playing.

No more, I buy a game for my PS3 and it works... No messing it just works and any game that comes out for the next few years will Just work.

Now my PC lives in my office, I run Virtual Machines on it, only thing its good for now.

PS I Still have my laptop at home to browse the net, PS3 is good but the browsers not a match for Fire fox/Oprea.

Grow Up!!!

For Christ sake why don't half of you bugger off to the playground and have a fight and sort it out.

Spectrum vs C64

Atari vs Amiga

Xbox 360 vs PS3

It doesn't matter.

If you bought a XBOX 360 OK, if you bought a PS 3 fine, If you got a Wii great. I hope you all get lots of fun out of them. But stop all this mine is better than your crap!!!! You sound like a bunch of 9 year olds.

If Sony want to lose $400 per console it doesn't bother me, if Microsoft want to lose $1,000 per Xbox does it really matter?? It's their business.

Personally I wish more companies would do this, Porsche 911 for £1000 anybody, ( OK Ferrari for £1100 because the mentality of people on the site somebody will say that Ferrari's are better).

For info I have a PS2 and it plays games, exactly what is says on the tin.

@mat & mark

sorry but which is it with the PS3, bung in a game and it 'just works' or 5min partial installs. What happens if you don't have any space left? do you have to uninstall/delete something else just to play or does it jst degrade the performance? As every PS3 must have a hard disk, every game uses it, what if it's not available as there's no space on it. Can you defragment the drive when months of playing/dowloading have put things all over it?

You mention no messing about with graphics settings, but i'm assuming you set the screen ratio and resolution. Most 360 games have graphics settings so I'd assume PS3 is the same. And if you really struggle with settings such as low/medium/high/insane then you have further problems, yes you can tweak absolutely everything if you choose, but most people just stick it on high and start playing.

And you must be having a laugh, no faffing about with updates, there have been fw updates for the console and every game will be aware of the net and download updates as and when they become available. And considering the state some games have been released in you'd better hope that updates do come out!

So far pretty much identical to modern pc gaming, since the advent of dvd's(although i'll admit it took the producers long enough to start using the things) the installs tend not to take 30mins and 5 disks either, just 5mins or so. Some games even do a minimal install in a few secionds and do the rest while you are playing.

@ "I-Really-Am-Mark" Poster, & @ A Baird

Will the imposter please just fuck off... To the posters replying to the imposter: please read it carefully. Any sarcasm or willful degradation to a PS3 is a sneaky hint that it's the imposter (Reg: you need to stop multiple accounts using the same name! lol!)

A Baird: I too was a PC Gamer, but considering it was costing me upwards of a grand per latest, newest OS or Direct X software, i got bored and went back to a console (or rather consoles). The only games I play on a PC now are fitting for my PC: Counter Strike (still probably the best game ever to grace a screen) and the Thief series... (but that latter is just down to nostalgia). consoles just 'boot' up and you are away. none of this "will it work, will it not.." anymore with graphics cards, processors, and OSs. Wouldn't say that PC gaming is dying though...

Professionally, I know that Sony are still not too bothered about the loss. It's the worry about the sales of games that is their bothering, and with more and more games being bought they really have nothing to worry about!

@ A Baird

PC gaming? Don't make me laugh.

Here's precisely what's wrong with PC gaming for most people

We have six PCs of various ages in our house. A Compaq Pro Workstation (dual PII) which is used for nothing more than VPN remote access for work, an old Thinkpad which barely functions any longer, a Sony VAIO desktop P4 running XP, a Celeron beastie from Dell running XP, a home built Pentium 4 dual core running XP and a Toshiba Satellite that was shipped with Vista. Of the four systems that are still moderately useful, only the home built system (now 2 and bit years old) is capable of running any of the latest games. I could spend $100 on a video upgrade for it to boost the graphics, but most games are fine, as long as I don't expect the complete graphical wizardry in games. So I keep my $100. However none of the other three systems that run XP or Vista can run modern games as all require Nvidia or ATI graphics. The older XP systems are PCI based, so upgrade options are limited. There is (amazingly) an ATI card that supports DirectX 10 in a PCI slot, but other than that, the PCs are a dead end. The laptop too is a dead end as the integrated graphics on this supposedly Vista system are not capable of running any modern DirectX title. None of these systems were purchased specifically with gaming in mind. Then again neither were they the cheapest systems available. So after $1000s of investment in PCs, we have one system that can run games.

Most people eventually hit this same wall. And the with the rate that PC gaming hardware changes the wall hits after a couple of years, even when you are careful. That's a lot of investment in something that ultimately will be obsolete within about two years.

Then there is the whole piracy thing which I am certain makes developers think twice about it. Also, compared to console gaming, PC gaming is a small market. You can see why. Excluding the RROD fiasco, console typically have a life of about 5 or 6 years, sometimes longer. The hardware consistently drops in price, and the games never require you to have upgraded your system. Gee, can you guess why console gaming might be preferred?

@AC (A drop in the ocean compared to Xbox losses... )

I think your quoted figures for Sony are in Yen, not US$. The Google income statement for them shows an annual operating income of ~360bn, a figure close to the BBCs reported income of ~375bn, which is quoted as being in Yen.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7399937.stm

An online finance service, ADVFN, suggests that, as of end-March 2008, both have similar cash resources - Sony at just under $11bn, MS just under $12bn.

Interesting

Sony is close to breaking even in the second year. Sounds like PS2's cycle. Even if the cost to manufacture of PS3 falls this year to under $300, Sony will still not make any money as they know that they need to drop the price as soon as, or before, Microsoft drops the Xbox 360 price again. So Sony will pace their reduction in hardware costs with price reductions because they know that games and accessory sales are picking up as volume increases. They also know that the PS3 will approach a stable price point late this year or sometime next year. Much as the PS2 did, and from then on it's all gravy.

This is the same cycle that happened on PS1 and PS2. No one should fool themselves into believing that this is somehow not what was anticipated. Nintendo have taken a different route, and a very successful one at that, however if you believe that the Wii has a shelf life of 10 years, you're crazier than crazy Ken is/was.

@Highlander

Exatly, PS3 is performing ahead of both the PS1 and PS2 at the same point in their life. Actually the likeness of the PS2 is actually very suprising. People forget some VERY high profile news sites were claiming the PS2 was a flop back in 2001, and developers were whinging about it's revolutionary hardware was tricky to program for.. How foolish they must feel in hindsight...

@ Sam

Quote: "The final boot for PC gaming was when I bought Forged Alliance pack for Supreme commander, and found that even though I had 4Gb ram, 3 SATA2 disks in a RAID 5 config and a £200 video card (when I bought it 1950XTX) I still had to run it at mid settings and accept the stutter while playing."

Yeah, but I'll bet that even at mid settings it still looked better than the PS3's 'HD' graphics.

haha what a suprize

well ya see all you noobs out there saying ps3 is the greatest console ever haha no way microsoft is killing sony and its ps3 and very soon you will see sony die with its ps3 never liked what they did to the ps3 anyway its to big and bulky not many good games apart from the odd one also ps3 online experience is crap compared to microsofts online hahahah ps3 sucks